and that didn’t help me. But after a google search I was able to spot the problem. Amarok uses phonon in the backend and which in-turn depends on GStreamer to work. The problem revealed to be the missing of some GStreamer plugins which were used to play the mp3 files. GStreamer plugins are grouped into several packages: base, good, bad and ugly. Slackware 14 was not giving ugly group ( This package contains plug-ins from the “ugly” set, a set of good-quality plug-ins that might pose distribution problems.) of plugins out of the box, probably because of its license. I installed ugly plugins, i.e, gst-plugins-ugly, but I didn’t know if it was enough so Installed gst-plugins-bad and gst-plugins-ffmpeg also. It was a blind shot but it worked. And I am happily hearing to some music now, Amaroking by the way ;).